Vertica, a column-oriented analytic database technology provider, has announced a major new release of the Vertica Analytic Database with new performance, analytic and security features designed for robust analytic data management processes in modern data centers. The announcement was made at the TDWI World Conference in Chicago. Vertica Analytic Database 3.0 includes dozens of new features that were engineered into the product based on feedback from Vertica's fast-growing customer base, which is approaching 100 production installations after two years in business.
The Vertica Analytic Database is frequently being deployed in the creation of "teramarts," which are large subject-area data marts, to offload processing from enterprise data warehouses (EDWs). Putting a domain-specific data/teramart behind an EDW can enhance performance and analytic capabilities, and Vertica's product is often used this way in association with EDW environments from vendors such as Oracle and Teradata. The features in the new product release are intended to improve Vertica's capabilities in this regard in a variety of ways.
One particular area of focus for the Vertica 3.0 release is the ability to do more robust analytics through expanded SQL support. New SQL features include support for SQL-99 functions (such as LEAD/LAG and TIME_SLICE), new data views, and new data types. Dave Menninger, vice president of marketing and product management at Vertica, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "with SQL-99, less use of joins is required to do complex SQL statements. For example, the LEAD/LAG function enables analysts to perform time period comparisons without needing to create complex joins. Also, the TIME_SLICE function enables customers such as financial institutions to take an entire business day and divide it into discrete time buckets which are then used in algorithmic trading models."
The new product has also been enhanced to support the needs of modern data centers that are adopting virtualization and cloud computing to become more responsive to users, economical and greener. It also automatically analyzes and optimizes its performance, loads data faster, and has improved security features. Vertica 3.0 is available immediately and can be run on Linux servers, any VMware ESX or VMware Server-supported hardware, or on-demand in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). For more information on Vertica Analytic Database 3.0, go here.